


the beast won't go to sleep

by endquestionmark



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 18:41:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8678989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: “Why would Dumbledore defend you?” Graves leans forward. “Were you a star pupil?”Newt laughs. “Me,” he says. “Not at all. Always late to class, always covered in mud, constantly daydreaming and reading books under the table. No, I’m sure I was a nuisance.”“So why you,” Graves says, even more vehement, and Newt begins to wonder — far too late, and far too little — if he should worry.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Look. I've got nothing. Briefly: consent issues related to false identity, power imbalances, and also just flat-out consent issues. Have fun. Blame [Cat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit).

The Hudson is full of ice, not the lacework of frost and half-freeze that Newt knows from the Thames on its coldest days, but rotten half-cracked bergs of brackish water shot through with bubbles and silt. It gathers in floes clustered around the docks and massed in the inlets, great crumbling chunks that bob and shift even in those relatively quiet waters while the remainder is swept out to sea. Out in the middle of the river, where it is deepest and runs most calmly, Newt can see a narrow broken line of ice, up and downriver as far as Ellis Island.

Newt is concerned with neither the river nor its currents at the moment; he is more interested by what looks to be a kelpie, native to the city and its eccentricities. Instead of seaweed for a mane, Newt suspects that it is imitating some sort of algae, an amorphous mass of strands that disappears far too easily in the dark water, and there is a certain predatory indifference to its expression that he certainly hasn’t seen anywhere else in the world. “Try me,” he says to himself, and the kelpie blinks at him.

It certainly has a territorial advantage over him. The chunk of ice on which Newt is standing tilts, jostled by his movements and the undercurrent that sweeps silt from the island’s shores and muddies the harbor, and he grabs at the rotten pilings of the ferry dock. They had served him well enough as a staircase down to the river, but the wood is soft from years of exposure and inadequate upkeep, and Newt finds himself with a handful of splinters and no particular handhold. He is — very briefly — startled by the pain, and then the ice tips and dumps him into the river with a minimum of ceremony and a maximum of indignity.

The Hudson’s brackishness makes itself known to Newt, thoroughly and personally, as he comes up spluttering through a mouthful of half-salt water. It probably saves him as well, since the ice is partial and offers plentiful handholds, although each chunk slips away as Newt’s fingers go numb and the cold works its way inwards, beyond the initial shocking burst of it — like a physical blow — towards something like an occupation. Newt kicks and splutters his way towards the shore, and thinks that it may be weeks before he remembers how to feel warm again.

“Mr. Scamander,” someone says. “A little undignified for an aspiring author, surely.”

Newt briefly loses the battle against inertia and the gradual waterlogging of his coat and dips below the surface again. When he breaks back through, ice scraping at his skin and slipping beneath his collar, he blinks the water from his eyes and just barely makes out a dark figure, standing on the shore. “I’m a little busy,” he says, badly out of breath. Newt is beginning to suspect that it will also take him several weeks to wring the Hudson out of his lungs; in the meantime, he sounds as if his throat is full of river gravel. “If you want to leave a disparaging review you’ll have to wait until it’s published like everyone else. Assuming it does get published,” he adds, and wonders if he should try for the pilings instead. No use; his fingers are already too numb for him to pull himself back up to the landing. The shore is his only chance. “If I drown, that’d save us both the trouble.”

“If you drown, your over-industrious friend will have quite a lot of paperwork to do.” Newt finds himself in the grip of something not unlike a singleminded riptide, being towed towards the shore at a rate unconcerned with neither his dignity nor the number of abrasions he accumulates along the way. Percival Graves, remote as ever, looks at Newt with a certain wintry abstract disinterest. “Which I will then have to sign off on, and significantly revise to exclude the more unnecessary minutiae. And I would enjoy that at any other time, but this week we’re a little short on manpower. Can you manage to keep yourself alive until the current crisis is over, at least? After that you can feed yourself to whatever kind of beast you want.” He reaches down and hauls Newt bodily onto the shore by the soaked-through collar of his coat, yanking him to his feet. “And you.”

For a moment, Newt thinks that Graves has simply switched angles to better berate him as thoroughly as possible, but after a moment — his teeth are chattering, now that the river wind has free access to his skin, now that his clothes are beginning to frost over, and Newt thinks he might begin to shake in another second — he realizes that Graves is looking over his shoulder. “Oh,” he says, voice small and unsteady. “So I was right.”

Graves clucks at the kelpie, the brusque click of someone used to handling animals. New York still has horses, carriages and retired fire-fighting teams, and Graves addresses the kelpie like a stubborn colt. “Enough with the tourists,” he says, and Newt has to keep himself from taking offense at that; if he did, Graves would undoubtedly give him the same unimpressed look and disinterested tone of voice. “You know better.”

The kelpie nickers — more than a little sardonic in tone and meaning, if Newt had to guess, and almost certainly impugning his intelligence — and dives. The waters seethe for a moment and then settle, leaving no trace of its presence. “Well,” he tries to say, and gets stuck on the consonant.

“And you,” Graves says, turning to Newt and leaving him in no doubt about the target of Graves’ renewed ire. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’d never seen one before,” Newt says, forcing the words out through sheer willpower and not a little contrariness. “Not the species — I’ve seen kelpies before, obviously, I'm not an amateur — but I’d never seen the particular subspecies or regional variant, and none of the ones I’m familiar with have that particular pattern of filamentous mimicry; they’re all typically more laminar given their prevalence in environments with considerably more plant life, and I thought if I could get a slightly closer look it might be an interesting side note for—” He trails off, breath barely a wisp of white between them, and adds, a little stupidly: “—my book.”

“Your book,” Graves says, unmoved.

Newt nods and stands there, dripping onto the beach and feeling increasingly undignified and small and useless; something in Graves’ tone and the way that he looks at Newt reminds him of what it felt like to be a small child mucking about at the end of the garden with a magnifying lens and a homemade aspirator and a jam jar covered in gauze. Hobbies that he was meant to grow out of, to leave behind with other childish amusements like his overdeveloped affection for garden pests and a contrarian streak born of being told to do things like grow out of his hobbies: Newt has never taken kindly to condescension from the unqualified.

Graves does not strike Newt as unqualified, but the reflex is too strong for Newt to ignore or shake. Before he can do anything stupid, like shake Graves’ hand off his collar and make his way to Tina’s cloisters of an apartment on foot, Graves shakes his head. “You’re freezing,” he says, as if personally disappointed, and takes off his coat. Without another word, he drapes it around Newt’s shoulders; of the two of them Newt is taller, but only barely, and lacks any sort of breadth to go with his height. He pulls the coat closed and looks at Graves.

“Thanks,” Newt says, awkward, and smiles in case it helps, though he isn’t particularly hopeful. “What about you? Really, I’ll be all right, as long as—” He pats the pocket of Graves’ coat, and then remembers his own and checks that. His notebook is intact, if somewhat the worse for wear, but Newt has salvaged it from waterlogged scraps before. “—aha,” he says, a little belated. “Inexhaustible magic, as they say.” Graves looks at him sharply, and Newt stumbles over his own words. “I had a professor,” he explains, “absolute genius, never gave up on me. He always could turn a phrase.”

“I see,” Graves says, and takes Newt by the elbow. “Why don’t you—”

The world spins around them. Newt, already dizzy from cold, feels his knees buckle; Graves has an iron grip on his elbow, and keeps him from going face-first into the floorboards. “—tell me,” Graves says, and Newt can feel the press of his fingertips, tight enough to bruise.

He lets go, and Newt stumbles. “He was my Transfiguration professor,” he says, head still spinning. There is a fire crackling in the grate, and more than anything Newt wants to curl up in front of it until some of the ache has left his bones. “Albus Dumbledore. He’s been at Hogwarts for a few years, I think, certainly as long as I’ve been there. Do you know him? Of him?” His jaw aches and his fingers are beginning to smart as the feeling returns to them, an awful endless pins-and-needles stinging that remains even when Newt flexes his hands.

“The name seems familiar,” Graves says, and turns from the fireplace. “You must be cold.” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “You can stay for the night, if you don’t mind the guest bed and get cleaned up first.” He undoes his cufflinks and drops them on the mantelpiece, one at a time; Newt feels rather like a party to something he doesn’t understand yet, a perpetual foreigner amidst his own kind. “Next room, down the hall. And leave my coat,” Graves adds.

Newt jumps, feeling suddenly guilty, caught in an abuse of hospitality. He shrugs Graves’ coat from his shoulders and holds it out, awkward in his confusion until Graves nods at the sofa, and leaves it draped over the back.

In the hallway, Newt takes what feels like his first breath since coming out of the water — his entire body aches now, the superficial misery of renewed sensation and the deeper spasm of cold and exhaustion — and wonders if he should send a message to Tina. It isn’t as if Newt is in any danger, and she and Queenie seem well-suited to keep Kowalski from any further harm. Newt had slipped out alone, after taking a moment to care for the contents of his case; he had been struck by curiosity as to the city’s less obvious inhabitants, and in the dead of night a walk by the river had seemed like the most reasonable undertaking.

With his fingertips white from cold and his breath still uneven, Newt begins to rethink that conclusion. In the next room there is a hot bath, still steaming; Graves either employs house-elves or has a particular talent for orchestrating magical undertakings over a distance and without a direct line of sight. He strikes Newt as the sort to prefer solitude in his own home, but such a talent would be wasted on housekeeping. Another mystery for another day, Newt decides, hanging his own silt-rimed coat on the doorknob and leaving the rest of his clothes on the tile and folding himself into the tub.

The heat is the most painful thing that Newt has ever suffered, more or less in silence; it comes as just as much a shock as the icy river, and seems to have a cumulative effect. He struggles to control his breathing, and fails utterly. Instead, he curls his numb fingers around the edge of the tub and is therefore reminded of the splinters broken off in his palm, the creases of his fingers, one wedged under a nail and crusted in red.

After the initial shock fades, Newt begins to shiver, and wedges his feet against the enamel to try and stop. His skin is flushed red, from heat and reaction and only partially because of the indignity of the situation, and Newt looks around for a towel. There are none, so he stays in the bath instead, and when his hands are a little steadier Newt turns his attention to the splinter under his nail, blackened and soft.

Before he can do anything, there is a knock; Graves doesn’t wait for an answer, again, but Newt is beginning to get the impression that he never does. He comes in with a glass in each hand, as a towel follows and folds itself on the rack by the sink and a robe hangs itself from the back of the door. “Let me see,” Graves says, and sets one amber-filled glass on the edge of the tub and the other on the floor. He takes Newt’s hand between his and turns it over, fingertips light on Newt’s wrist, and for some reason Newt thinks of — rather than any of the creatures that have been his life’s work — something entirely different, old and rare and truly mythical, the sort of beast that becomes a legend in its own right simply by being. Graves carries an air of momentum with him, a certain wind of change; he makes Newt wonder what forces really do make the world go round, that he can’t see or hear and will likely never understand.

Graves removes the splinters from Newt’s hand, one at a time, separating rotten wood from his heat-softened skin, and leaves them on the side of the tub in a tidy pile. He draws a neat bead of blood from each puncture, proof of a clean wound, and then closes the skin after it. When Graves is done — all of it without a single word — he submerges Newt’s hand in the bathwater, and the blood diffuses into nothing.

“Thanks,” Newt says. It sounds even more awkward the second time.

Graves nods. “Drink that,” he says, retrieving his own glass. “I have some questions.” Unspoken: and don’t take too long, Newt thinks. He nods, and Graves leaves the door slightly ajar.

Newt wants to get up and close it; he looks at the pile of splinters, the tumbler of what looks like very good Scotch, and thinks of the heat still leaching its way to his aching core.

He leaves the door, and drinks the Scotch.

By dint of exhaustion or comfort or tipsiness, time begins to move strangely after that. The Scotch leaves a taste of smoke in Newt’s mouth, and a pleasant warmth in his chest; when he finally gets up, leaving the bath to drain, minutes or hours might have passed.

Either way, Graves is waiting in the next room, half-full glass at his elbow as he sits by the fire. He looks up when Newt makes his inelegant way in, clumsy with whatever it is that makes his limbs feel heavy and fills him with warmth; and then looks back away. The rest of the room has been rearranged, sofa gone to make way for a bed and chairs set back against the shelves. Newt has only ever seen so many books in the library at Hogwarts and, before that, his father’s study on the rare occasions when he was allowed in. More often than not, he was deemed too muddy for admittance, and exiled to the kitchen for cleaning and chastisement. The books make the room seem full, taking up the excess space with the weight of words and stories, a canon spanning centuries and worlds.

Newt sits at the end of the bed, fingers curled into the covers, and remembers the first time he saw a bestiary, a great illuminated artwork of a manuscript with gesso-lifted gilt and embellishment in the text as well as the art. It had seemed just as fantastical as the beasts described within, and Newt had known that he would never want to know about anything else as badly, not enough to ever stop coming home covered in mud and scratched by briars and buoyed up by the victory of discovery.

He wants, more than anything, to know and to share that knowledge; it strikes him as a privilege to do so in service of a subject and cause he loves more than anything else.

Graves sets his glass down, finally, and looks up. “You knew Albus Dumbledore,” he says.

Newt nods. “He argued on my behalf,” he says. “When I was—” He breaks off. “In some difficulty — administrative trouble.” No matter how much Newt knows that he can do better work unhindered by academia, it still smarts. “He said that any attempt to further our understanding of the unknown, and to shed a little light, was worthy of Hogwarts’ support.”

Graves snorts. “Of course,” he says. “No matter the cost.”

“So you know him? Knew him.” Newt corrects himself. “When?”

“Why you?” Graves leans forward. “Were you a star pupil?”

Newt laughs. “Me,” he says. “Not at all. Always late to class, always covered in mud, constantly daydreaming and reading books under the table. No, I’m sure I was a nuisance.”

“So why you,” Graves says, even more vehement, and Newt begins to wonder — far too late, and far too little — if he should worry. The fire is so warm, and the room so familiar and full, and Newt is above all so tired of being lost and lonely and confused; no matter how far he travels, and how much he learns, he sometimes wonders if he understands less than ever. Perhaps it comes down to the common denominator after all; perhaps he is the common factor in his inability to understand, to communicate, to find somewhere that might love him back, outside the pages of a book and his own traveling case.

“If you weren’t remarkable — no talent,” Graves says, enumerating Newt’s failings with bloodless thoroughness, “no respectable ambition, no academic potential, no great vision — of course.” He stands up, leans on the mantelpiece for a moment and then seems jostled into motion again by his own dissatisfaction. “That’s it. You do have one, don’t you?”

Newt stares at him. “What?”

“A vision,” Graves says, rounding on Newt and enunciating as if each syllable causes him personal offense. “Interspecies unity, magical discovery, that sort of thing. That’s why you do this, isn’t it? You’ve got some bright idea of how the world should be, and what we need to do to get there.”

“I mean.” Newt winces as he says it. “I wouldn’t call it a vision, and I’m not really sure of what we need to do, but.” He considers a smile, and decides against it. “Yes?”

Graves turns away. “Of course,” he says, and Newt decides rather blurrily that he has some questions of his own.

“So you know Dumbledore,” he says. “I mean, you must.”

“Knew,” Graves says. “Everyone who will ever be worth anything has known Dumbledore at one point or another.”

Newt stands, still awkward but made slightly less so by obstinacy and curiosity. “Why do you care?” he says, arms crossed, and goes to stand by the fire. It sets him at ease, the sound and the heat, makes him lazy and sleepy and warm. “For somebody who won’t answer any questions, you certainly have enough.”

Graves looks down at the mantel, at his own fingers tapping on the marble. “Careful,” he says. There is a ring on his finger, a signet of some sort, and Newt is seized by the sort of curious impulse that tends to get him in trouble. He leans in for a closer look, and senses Graves’ awareness of his proximity, the bare moment of tolerance that a pack predator might grant a subordinate.

“May I,” Newt says — and thinks, to hell with it, if Graves never waits for an answer then why should he — and reaches out.

Graves moves too quickly for him to see or evade, hand closing around Newt’s wrist before he can register any movement, and his grip is painfully tight again.

Newt winces. “I’d just like to see,” he says, in the voice that he reserves for spooked animals and people who he desperately wants to understand, and raises one finger. Graves maintains his grip on Newt’s wrist, but allows him to take Graves’ hand in his own and turn it over, tracing the crest on the ring. Half a question, half for something to say, he asks: “Hogwarts?”

“It was a gift,” Graves says. “I wear it as a reminder.” He lets Newt go, and considers the ring for a moment before sliding it off. “You don’t wear one.”

“I was interrupted,” Newt says, and looks down.

Graves takes his hand and considers it for a moment, an oddly detached evaluation that tugs at something in Newt, catches his interest in a way that he can neither understand nor undo. He slides the ring onto Newt’s third finger, sets it close to the knuckle and lets him look at it for a moment. “It suits you,” he says, and lifts Newt’s hand, lets the firelight glint off the metal.

Newt doesn’t breathe.

When he thinks that the moment — or either of them — must break, Graves lifts his hand to his mouth, and presses his mouth to Newt’s knuckles. Nothing more than a moment of contact, hardly more than a provocation, but whatever it is that caught Newt’s attention surges back and knocks the breath from him.

He might not be any good at talking, at being anything other than an annoyance, but sometimes Newt understands in a moment of clarity. He understands that he has been lonely for a long time, and that Graves is somehow equally alone in his study full of books, his perfectly orchestrated house, his furnished and fire-warmed life. He understands that Graves is unused to being challenged, just as he is unused to being considered with any seriousness; he understands that touch carries a thousand meanings that need no translation; he understands that he _wants_ , with a fierceness that surprises him, and that Graves — for whatever reason — seems inclined to indulge him.

Newt holds very still, and Graves turns his hand over and presses at the places where there are still pinprick marks left where he removed splinters; he lifts Newt’s hand to his mouth again, and bites at his fingertips, never breaking eye contact for a moment. When he gasps, Graves makes a satisfied noise deep in his chest and walks Newt backwards, one hand on his wrist and the other on his shoulder, thumb pressed just below his collarbone, until his knees hit the bed and he goes over backwards, still dizzy and short of breath as Graves pins him easily with his weight and considers him.

He strips Newt out of his robe, first, unties the belt and lets it fall open and runs his hands down Newt’s sides, thumbs following the curve of his ribcage and then his hipbones, turns his face into the slope of Newt’s neck and rests his teeth over the pulse there. He runs one hand down the flat of Newt’s sternum, skims his too-visible ribs and the faint concavity of his belly, scratches through the hair below his navel and rests his palm there, as if preempting any further movement. He noses at the underside of Newt’s jaw, the delicate skin over his trachea, leaves no marks but the warmth of his breath and the awareness that, at any moment, he could bite down; Newt, tangled in fabric, finally manages to extricate himself enough for one decisive movement and uses it to reverse their positions.

Graves is still dressed from work, waistcoat, shirt, and trousers; Newt is momentarily lost for actions before he undoes Graves’ belt, gets his clothes out of the way and learns him by touch, with no words to get in the way. He learns the curve of Graves’ cock, thick and hot and flushed dark, and the way that Graves sounds when he’s holding himself back. He learns that Graves prefers a confident touch, but more than that he prefers eagerness to please; he learns that Graves likes to be watched, so that he can give his approval, and Newt — not particularly to his surprise, but still — learns that he takes a certain pleasure in seeking it.

Before too long, Graves settles one hand in Newt’s hair and pulls. That takes him a moment, to get the trick of it, and Graves doesn’t make it easy. He gives Newt a moment, lets him press kisses to the base of his cock and work his way down, but before long he simply takes over — shoves Newt’s head down, holds him there as he gasps and fights his own reflexes, fucks into his mouth by increments — and only lets Newt up once his mouth is a mess, red and swollen and wet, barely gives him a chance to gasp for air before he does it again.

When Newt tries to pull away Graves _snarls_ , yanks him back and smears wetness across his mouth with his thumb and pushes his cock back into Newt’s mouth an inch at a time. Newt goes, because it seems easier, gets his hands onto Graves’ hips to get a little bit of leverage and just lets Graves use him like that — rough and filthy and entitled — and it begins to feel good, almost, like being useful. Like being good at — for — something, and like being valued; it curls in his chest, hot like smoke and just as caustic, and when Graves comes down his throat and doesn’t let him up even then, it leaves him hollow and hopeless.

He wheezes when Graves finally lets him up, but manages to say: “Please.”

Graves pins him again with one hand at Newt’s throat. He pushes two fingers into Newt’s mouth and makes him suck, get those messy as well, before he shoves Newt’s legs apart and works him open, methodical and thorough and not remotely gentle. Newt gasps for air, and Graves tightens his grip; when he tries to shove back, to get a little more, Graves pins him even harder. Still in most of his suit, still put-together for all that Newt already looks like a fucked-out wreck, his aspect is terrible in the most original sense; something other than human, something out of old stories and whispered legends.

Newt wants, suddenly, to be able to take it back. He doesn’t know if he would, only that he wants the choice, and that it’s too late for that; he wants to unmake Graves’ mark on him, a matter of hot breath and fingerprints and the heavy ring on his finger. He wants to feel less used, less valued, to give back the way that Graves looks at him — all-encompassing, assessing — and the way that Graves had pulled the splinters from his hand, horribly tender.

He wants to unknow, to undo the entanglement of instinct and reflex that had driven him to begin with, to take it all back, but more than any of that he wants to go further, to see if more is what makes the difference. He wants to come, and then to do it all over again; he wants to see what it takes for Graves to leave a visible mark; he wants with a ferocity that he doesn’t recognize in himself, and so when he comes that surprises him as well: how visceral it is, how impossible to describe and name and know.

Graves doesn’t let him up for another long minute, as Newt jerks, oversensitive, and tries to get away. When he does, he wipes his hand on Newt’s hip and looks at the sticky mess on Newt’s belly, filthy. “Clean that up,” he says, setting himself back in order. “I won’t wake you tomorrow, but I won’t wait either. And I should warn you: the house isn’t very friendly to guests who outstay their welcome.”

“I won’t,” Newt says, still a little dazed. He feels dirty, now, used up and fucked-out, but some small part of him still takes satisfaction in that. It hums along his spine, the faintest thread of carnality, too old and fundamental to name.

Graves nods.

“Good,” he says, and when he goes out, he leaves the door ajar.


End file.
